You Knew This Was Coming: Congress Fingers Snowden in Vast Russian Conspiracy

Former government contractor turned NSA leaker Edward Snowden has long been a highly controversial figure. Snowden has been both heralded as a patriot and condemned as a traitor for his revelation of the vast scope of Obama’s domestic surveillance that smashed the Fourth Amendment and allowed the feds to scoop up and store the most intimate data on millions of law-abiding Americans.

After absconding to Hong Kong in 2013 where he turned over a cache of data on what were for all intents and purposes unconstitutional domestic spying problems, Snowden attempted to flee to Latin America prior to the State Department revoking his passport. He was stranded in a the terminal at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport prior to being given amnesty by Russia.

The NSA documents provided to reporters Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill (who all won Pulitzer Prizes) revealed an Orwellian spying apparatus which the leaker dubbed as “turnkey totalitarianism” were it ever to fall under control of a tyrant – think Hillary Clinton. The Obama regime was humiliated as were the House and Senate intelligence mandarins who were outed as being derelict of their sworn oaths to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Now Snowden is being formally accused of being an enemy of America and a tool of Putin which fits nicely with the narrative that the Democrats and Emperor Obama have been selling that the Russians stole the election from Hillary.

The House of Representatives just delivered a wonderful Christmas gift for Team Hillary and the hysterics in the media with a heavily redacted and therefore secret report blasting Snowden to smithereens.

A scathing report by the House Intelligence Committee, backed by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, concludes that Edward Snowden was a disgruntled, serial liar who leaked for petty reasons, put American soldiers at risk and remains in continuing contact with Russian intelligence services.

The 37-page review, filled with redactions of classified material, does not accuse Snowden of being a spy, but it seeks to poke holes in nearly every aspect of his account of why he gave reporters reams of classified documents he obtained as a contractor — and trusted insider — with the National Security Agency.

Snowden immediately began denouncing the report on Twitter from his home in Russia, saying its core claims were made “without evidence” and that it established nothing worse than he might have been hard to work with.

His lawyer, Ben Wizner, told NBC News he considers the report “a failed attempt to discredit Edward Snowden, whose actions led to the most significant intelligence reforms in a generation.”

For the second time in two weeks Dilanian is one of the top purveyors of information the exonerates Hillary’s own corrupt and incompetent campaign in order to push a conspiracy theory on Russian meddling.

The NBC fake news piece entitled “U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack” lists Ken Dilanian as one of the major contributors to an article that is essentially a big nothing burger. While the NBC tale boldly claims that Putin himself was directing the entire hacking of the corrupt DNC as well as scuzzbucket John Podesta’s personal email account it relies on two anonymous intelligence sources to make the case. The problem outside of the sources who are too chickenshit to go on record is that the writer has a history of flogging CIA propaganda.

A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”

That Dilanian – and others – would be prostituting themselves out to the CIA is certainly no surprise, at least not if one understands that history of such things. Operation Mockingbird was a long-running CIA effort to cultivate American reporters to regurgitate agency propaganda to domestic audiences, a CIA operative once reportedly remarked to Washington Post owner Phillip Graham that “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month” and these days it’s probably even less.

And here is Dilanian once again with the big scoop.

The central point is that nothing that the media and the Obama administration say can be believed and that is even more the case with embittered members of Hillary’s government in waiting that just had their new jobs rudely ripped away from them by voters are feeding the propaganda machine on a daily basis.

Snowden has vehemently denied the allegations in the House report which he blasted via Twitter:

After three years of investigation and millions of dollars, they can present no evidence of harmful intent, foreign influence, or harm. Wow.

The argument as to whether Snowden is a patriot or a traitor will continue and it’s quite possible that he is a little of both – at least to many.

Without his leaks while in the employ of Booz-Allen Hamilton (a company whose ability to secure information clearly left much to be desired) Americans would have never know about the monstrous surveillance state Gomorrah nor of how they had zero say in any debate over it. On the other hand, as a member of a select fraternity of intelligence professionals it’s hard to argue that Snowden didn’t violate their trust and the code of honor that exists within.

As for him providing information to the Russians, well that is a very, very serendipitous revelation by the House in that the establishment hasn’t given up on keeping Trump out of the White House so look for the big media push to tie Snowden around the President-elects neck to reach a fever pitch and anything less than a call for his forced extradition will be labeled as further “evidence” that he is a Kremlin mole.

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Donn Marten is a libertarian critic of the corrupt establishment as well as a patriot seeking to do my part to make America great again. Donn has a unique insight and has written at such sites as Titanic Brass, Downtrend, The Federalist Papers Project, OpEd News, RINF and others.